Even if America is going through a political realignment, the dichotomies therein still contain a common thread: the avaricious strong outfacing the righteous meek.  Urban-dwelling toffs trying to stamp out salt-of-the-earth provincials is the most frequent framing of the ballot-box broigus.  Public affairs scholar Michael Lind pitches the conflict as one between the managerial elite and the working class.  Irish ink-spiller John Waters depicts the divide in architectural terms: "subsidized," sedentary office chair–warmers against callus-handed, "concrete"-molding stoop laborers.  Julius Kreen bins the working class from conflictual consideration, positing that the electoral war is actually between two capitalist clades: "elites primarily dependent on capital gains and those primarily dependent on profes­sional labor."

However you slice it, a new configuration's afoot.  Many a bold prediction is being made about the upshot of these nascent alliances.  Will the Republican Party continue to shed its buttoned-up, blue-nosed gentility for a more worker-friendly, perhaps even more crude, image?  Will Democrats drop benighted rurals from their ranks and truly embrace the "coalition of the ascendant," including many grossly rich financiers?

It's all up in the air.  Donald Trump's populist hold on the GOP seems here to stay, even if he's wanting for a clear heir apparent.  Democrats are also coping with their own internal anti-establishment insurgency in the ruddy wen-shape of a crotchety old New England socialist.  By now, the only person in America still in denial about Bernie Sanders stitching up the Democratic nomination is DNC head Tom Perez, who has locked himself in his South Capitol Street office and is shaking and despondent under his desk, liquidly self-medicating.

This year, like four years ago, voters are dissenting from Washington's longstanding conjuncture of centripetal power-mongering.  While stiff-suited pundits with caked on foundation nervously gnaw their cuticles on Sunday-morning roundtables over Joe Biden's sinking campaign, those dreaded flyover-state denizens are opting for a candidate outside the mainstream.  Sanders's backers show no sympathy in their exfiltration of the Democratic Party.  Bernie's band of excitable rich-soakers was supposed to supplement the party, not be the party.  Now they're sniggering over their sweeping of the primary, proudly announcing to the old FDR guard, nous avons changé tout cela.

Does this mean there is common cause between the burn-it-down Sanderistas and equally angry Trumpers, and that this congruity could be the basis of a new political binary?  Anti-elitism, after all, isn't exclusively partisan.  On a Venn diagram plotting the interests of Trump voters against Bernie acolytes, surely some things must reside within the intersection.

Irrespective of commonalities, including a shared upwardly focused resentment, there remains a fundamental divide between the congealing sides: that musty old thing called the Constitution.  In his new book, The Age of Enlightenment, Christopher Caldwell elucidates our new philosophical order, marking the catalyst of our ongoing political split back at the passage of civil rights legislation.  Caldwell writes, "the [civil-rights acts] had wrought a change in the country's constitutional culture.  The innovations of the 1960s had given progressives control over the most important levers of government, control that would endure for as long as the public was afraid of being called racist."

Out of the heady series of civil-rights laws sprung a new fascination — nay, obsession — with race and inequality.  Affirmative action, busing, racial quotas, minority representation in the media, reparations, rectifying inequities, liberality in immigration enforcement — these policies flowed out of the font of civil rights measures without always having explicit codification.  As Caldwell notes, such "disparate preoccupations did not spring up simultaneously by coincidence.  They were old minoritarian impulses that could now, through the authority of [civil rights law], override every barrier that democracy might seek to erect against them."

American culture and big business are now enforcers of the civil rights spirit, sanctioning dissenters with monetary penalties or ostracization.  No law is needed to impose punishment on behalf of the left's ragbag of the aggrieved, including gays, transsexuals, and women.  Your state votes to limit public restroom usage to sex?  With the NCAA just might pull its championship games, causing a financial blow to your city.

In its own way, the self-confirming logic of civil rights has established a new, more modern constitution.  Caldwell elaborates on how this defines the divide of our new partisan formulation:

It is the disagreement over which of the two constitutions shall prevail: the de jure constitution of 1788, with all the traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture behind it; or the de facto constitution of 1964, which lacks this traditional kind of legitimacy but commands the near-unanimous endorsement of judicial elites and civic educators and the passionate allegiance of of those who receive it as a liberation.

Bernie Sanders has dropped his old-school Marxism in favor of identarian ideology, which is the ideology of the civil rights in extremis.  The Democratic Party is now the party of 1963, and all the laws, formal or informal, that came after. 

Republicans, whether they realize it or not, are defenders by default of traditional American governance, from Ellsworth to Eisenhower.  This is the new battle line.  Economic class still plays a role in splitting the ranks, but what we're arguing over is more fundamental than income brackets: the American way of life.

How it all shakes out is a matter not of starry destiny, but of ourselves.